Law and order goes national

Keith Waterhouse

Last updated at 15:43 04 May 2004

A nation-wide crime-busting bureau, eh? Well, I suppose it should make a good TV series.

'Ere, Guv, what have we got on Chummy? You still reckon he's the Mister Big behind them 15 lorryloads of Bulgarian asylum seekers we tracked down to a squalid hovel in the back streets of Dover two weeks ago?'

Michael Howard, who has done his share of demanding 'national solutions to national problems' over the years, perhaps picked the wrong week in which to promise a cull of the swelling army of Whitehall bureaucrats.

As we all know by now, the police are no strangers to red tape. When Britain's answer to the FBI gets cracking, how many of its 5,500 posts will be desk jobs? Not to mention the overspending on a sumptuous new headquarters the size of the Kremlin?

Already, there are demands for the new squad to be answerable to a 'supervisory body'. Oh my God, it's the BBC all over again!

Does Britain really need its own national police force anyway? Certainly, there are forces - Cambridgeshire for one, at the time of the Holly and Jessica tragedy, that could have done with a rocket under them.

And it does seem odd that while Morecambe Bay was seething with Chinese cocklepickers, no one seems to have thought to seek out their bosses until 19 of them drowned.

But at the end of the day, so I understand, the Brit FBI will be interested only in serious crime. Nineteen dead cockle-pickers is not serious crime. What we are talking about is tax evasion, smuggling, money-laundering, that sort of thing - the kind of activity that, when checked, brings in revenue for the Government.

Which makes them sound like a glorified branch of Customs & Excise - as if Customs & Excise wasn't glorified enough already.

What most people want of a national police force, if they want one at all, is a police force that catches burglars. I do not think that collar-feeling is on the national police roster of duties. It's not grand enough. Yet most crime victims fall prey to disorganised crime rather than organised crime.

But feeling Chummy's collar should be on the itinerary. U.S. Department of Justice research reports that fewer criminals are convicted in England and Wales than in other Western nations. Rising crime and falling conviction rates is the pattern - the opposite to the American graph.

Known as the Serious Organised Crime Agency - as distinct, I suppose, from the Frivolous Disorganised Crime Agency, the one where the Old Bill turn up three days later - the Brit FBI will get a budget of around Pounds 300 million to wage war on crime. With the support, I hope and trust, of the Crown Prosecution Service, which has yet to sound as if it is striving for Brownie points.

As always with these wildly ambitious initiatives, little is likely to change. Forget any romantic G-men image of the American FBI.

I have only ever encountered them twice - once when they were ploddingly checking passport visas in Florida, again when they were about to round up illegal immigrants staffing a hotel in Atlanta, Georgia.

An official told them that if they carried out this threat they would bring the Republican Convention to a stop since none of the delegates would get their beds made. They desisted. David Blunkett would approve.

And remember that when the FBI finally caught up with Al Capone, it was only for tax evasion.

The constant banging on by our masters on either side of the Atlantic about weapons of mass destruction coupled with the 45-minute threat is beginning to sound like a rerun of that film Groundhog Day.

Is the idea to bore us to the point at which we beg them for heaven's sake to put another record on?

If it is, why do they keep on embellishing their stories? As a junior reporter I was brought up to believe that over-explanation is the mark of a practised liar.

President Bush gave us a prime example this weekend: 'Saddam had the capacity to make a weapon and then let that weapon fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network.'

I think when the talk turns to shadowy networks it is time to go home. Can that be Blair and Bush at the front door, handing us our hats?